In any organization, risks can emanate from uncertainty in financial markets, project failures, legal liabilities, credit risk, accidents, natural causes and disasters as well as deliberate attacks from an adversary. Risk management involves two components: (1) the identification, assessment, and prioritization of risks, and (2) the coordinated and economical application of resources to minimize, monitor, and control the probability and/or impact of unfortunate events.
Information Technology (IT) risk management has become a critical element of an enterprise's risk strategy because IT has become a critical element of ongoing operations for many businesses. IT system and application failures can cause enterprises losses of up to millions of dollars per hour. To minimize risk exposure, some companies implement complex solutions to reduce risk, but most IT risk management solutions are designed to isolate systems from risk or to recover from catastrophic events, rather than to react to changing risk in the system.
Among the many advances in enterprise computer systems is the virtualization of computer resources. Virtualization of computer resources generally involves a software abstraction and redirection of underlying computer system hardware to one or more virtual machines. The virtual machines isolate operating systems and applications from underlying hardware and each other. Hardware can therefore be shared among a plurality of virtual machines each having a corresponding operating system.
Each virtual machine (VM) is a complete execution environment, and servers provide a user interface over the network connection so that user inputs and outputs are communicated between the user and the VM. As software abstractions of complete computer systems, virtual machines provide many benefits to the user aside increased hardware utilization. For instance, virtual machines maybe moved, or “migrated,” from one physical computer system to another, even while the virtual machine is running. The migration of a virtual machine from one physical computer system to another without significant interruption is referred to herein as “live migration.” Live migration allows for dynamic load balancing of hosts. An example of live migration is provided by VMware® VMotion™ technology. Virtualization allows other benefits such as automated maintenance, power management, storage management, etc.